With study-after-study showing climate impacts from extreme weather to polar melt and sea level rise outstripping initial forecasts, negotiators have a fast-closing window to try to turn the aspirations agreed in Paris into meaningful outcomes.

“There’s so much on the line in the next 18 months or so,” said Sue Reid, vice-president of climate and energy at Ceres, a U.S. non-profit group that works to steer companies and investors onto a more sustainable path.

“This is a crucial period of time both for public officials and the private sector to really reverse the curve on emissions,” Reid told Reuters.

In October, the U.N.-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned emissions must start falling next year at the latest to stand a chance of achieving the deal’s goal of holding the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

With emissions currently on track to push temperatures more than three degrees higher, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is working to wrest bigger commitments from governments ahead of a summit in New York in September.

Telling world leaders that failing to cut emissions would be “suicidal,” the Portuguese diplomat wants to build momentum ahead of a fresh round of climate talks in Chile in December.

By the time Britain convenes a major follow-up summit in late 2020, plans are supposed to be underway – in theory at least – to almost halve global emissions over the next decade.

“In the next year-and-a-half we will witness an intensity of climate diplomacy not seen since the Paris Agreement was signed,” said Tessa Khan, an international climate change lawyer and co-director of the Climate Litigation Network.

U.S climatologist Michael Mann believes emissions need to fall even more drastically than the IPCC assumes since the panel may be underestimating how far temperatures have already risen since pre-industrial times.

“Our work on this indicates that we might have as much as 40% less carbon left to burn than IPCC implies, if we are to avert the 1.5 Celsius warming limit,” said Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University.

Mann has urged governments to treat the transition to renewable energy with the equivalent urgency that drove the U.S. industrial mobilisation in World War Two.

So far, no major economy has taken heed.

Although Britain boosted the Paris Agreement in June by committing to net zero carbon emissions by 2050, the country, preoccupied by Brexit, is far from on a climate war footing.

Likewise, a push led by France and Germany for the European Union to adopt a similar target was relegated to a footnote at a summit in Brussels after opposition from Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary.

U.S. President Donald Trump remains committed to pulling the world’s second biggest emitter out of the Paris deal altogether.

Given the uncertain prospects for international cooperation to stabilise the climate on which life on earth depends, some are starting to steel themselves for the unravelling of the world they once knew.

“Either we radically transform human collective life by abandoning the use of fossil fuels or, more likely, climate change will bring about the end of global fossil-fuelled capitalist civilization,” wrote U.S. author Roy Scranton, in an April essay in MIT Technology Review.

“Revolution or collapse — in either case, the good life as we know it is no longer viable.”

Here are other interesting articles published recently in Le Figaro (in French). Note that I sent a letter to Generali yesterday, 2 rue Pillet Will, Paris 9 and I tried to found the location of the building. I realized that there were offices of Le Figaro just in front of this building, 1 rue Pillet Will.

Tonight, I'm going to talk about Bruno Patino's new book, titled "the civilization of the red fish".

The goldfish is turning in its fish bowl. It seems to rediscover the world every turn. Google engineers have managed to calculate the maximum duration of its attention: 8 seconds. These same engineers evaluated the attention span of millenials generation, the one that grew with connected screens: 9 seconds. We have become goldfish, locked in the fiish bowl of our screens, subject to the carousel of our alerts and our instant messages.

A study by the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology estimated at 30 minutes the maximum time for exposure to social networks and Internet screens beyond which a threat to mental health appears. According to this study, my case is desperate, as my daily practice is that of an addiction to the signals that clutter the screen of my phone. We are all on the path of addiction: children, young people, adults.

For those who have believed in digital utopia, of which I am a part, the time of regret has arrived. Thus Tim Berners Lee, the "inventor" of the web, who is now trying to create a counter-Internet to annihilate his first creation. Utopia, however, was beautiful, which brought together, in an identical communion, followers of Teilhard de Chardin or Californian libertarians under acid.

Digital servitude is the model built by the new empires, without anticipating it, but with relentless determination. At the heart of the reactor, no technological determinism, but a project that reflects the mutation of a new capitalist: the economy of attention. It's about increasing the productivity of time to extract even more value. After reducing the space, it's about extending time while compressing it, and creating an infinite snapshot. The general acceleration has replaced habit with attention, and satisfaction with addiction. And algorithms are today the machine tools of this economy ...This economy of attention destroys, little by little, our bearings. Our relationship to the media, public space, knowledge, truth, information, nothing escapes the economy of attention that prefers reflexes to reflection and passions to reason. Philosophical lights are extinguished in favor of digital signals. The market of attention is the society of fatigue.Regrets, however, are useless. The time of the fight has arrived, not to reject the digital civilization, but to transform its economic nature and make it a project that abandons the transhumanist nightmare to find the human ideal ... "

A person with lots of knowledge on military/intelligence Psy-Ops had told me around 2005 that Alex Jones was an CIA scare-agent, or a 'shill' if you prefer, that spreads disinformation in order to discredit 'thinking out of the box'.I don't consider myself a 'conspiracy theorist' but keeping an open-mind has and will always come in handy in the near & far future, unless it has to do with reptilians, gay frogs, or flat earth.

It's not about Bin Salman, I'm relieved.But I'm also disappointed. Frankly I think these are not videos that are worth listening to. And you say a bit later: "I'm not a conspiracy theorist". And yet you are watching this.For instance I found this video in the first link, titled "Hitler's Escape From Germany" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owN5ZBarMfsI'm sure that makes Vasudev and usman laugh. They even found his teeth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYfhv6vaZNU

I prefer real documentaries. For example, about the Dikkop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFAOnPvNyQIIf you are asking Maher what a dikkop is, I'm pretty sure he won't be able to answer before watching this video.Or the videos of "Bald and bankrupt". Fortunately, I'm neither bald nor bankrupt but the guy in these videos, in spite of his predicament, always releases good videos. For example the cheapest food in Europe. You may think you'll find it in London or in Paris. It's not the case: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=642qAOTKcxcOr the videos in French of Insolentiae TV, about the economy. For exampe this one which is about the..."economic collapse". Maybe it's better if you don't understand after all. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jc_aJdx7_w

I will gladly join them laughing at your joke, because yes, many theories out there are truly laughable but not all, the same applies to mainstream news media.

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I prefer real documentaries. For example, about the Dikkop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFAOnPvNyQIIf you are asking Maher what a dikkop is, I'm pretty sure he won't be able to answer before watching this video.Or the videos of "Bald and bankrupt". Fortunately, I'm neither bald nor bankrupt but the guy in these videos, in spite of his predicament, always releases good videos. For example the cheapest food in Europe. You may think you'll find it in London or in Paris. It's not the case: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=642qAOTKcxcOr the videos in French of Insolentiae TV, about the economy. For exampe this one which is about the..."economic collapse". Maybe it's better if you don't understand after all. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jc_aJdx7_w

Note that I added the photo of a dikkop. I've never seen any dikkop, and I'm sure it's the case for many of you, since this bird is native to tropical regions of central and southern Africa. Maher must have been flabbergasted when he discovered a bird able to fight komodo dragons.Note that the French translation for the dikkop is "L'Œdicnème tachard". And I can assure you that I'm sure few know what an œdicnème tachard is, I had never heard of this bird before watching the video.

I'd want to add a new video too, an excellent video, a must watch, about the economy and the stock markets (titled "anticipate the monetary collapse). With Charles Sannat. Unfortunately it's in French. This specialist tries to explain why central banks keep printing money. For him, it's an attempt to conceal the energy collapse. Actually I don't totally agree with him (about the reasons). He also explains that economies are over indebted and rate hikes are now causing stock market collapses. We have seen that last December.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnH6WQ_-UXM